“Could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated?”
That sounds like an excerpt from a science fiction novel about a medical dystopia. But it’s a quote from Vivek Ramaswamy, the biopharma entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate.
In April 2020, as the U.S. went into lockdown, Ramaswamy said he would be open to that kind of system to determine who could “go back to normal life.” He described it as an “inequity,” but concluded that “everyone stands to benefit from it.” Ramaswamy made the comments during an episode of Rockefeller Client Insights, the podcast of Rockefeller Capital Management.
A concept like that is sharply at odds with the image of the civil libertarian he has cultivated during the primary. It also raises questions about his anti-establishment bona fides.
During the podcast, Ramaswamy talked about different aspects of the coronavirus outbreak with Gregory J. Fleming, the president and CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management. Fleming asked him what a “path to normalcy” might look like, given what he described as a “potentially extended timeline” for the rollout of vaccines and treatments. The country was then more than 15 days into “15 days to slow the spread.”
“One path to normalcy and a path that I’d like to see further progress made on is broad rollout of our antibody tests,” Ramaswamy said. He corrected himself and continued:
“It’s not our company; I’m saying, as a society, rolling out the antibody tests such that we actually get our arms around what portion of the population is already immune through exposures that they may not have even known that they had. It might be 10 percent, it might be 20 percent, we might discover that it is some higher number. Those people are gonna be able to get back to work pretty quickly, get back to normal life because effectively they have the immunity badge, they have a badge in the form of their antibodies that protect them best we know from reinfection.
On the flip side, you then have the people who don’t have immunity, and the question is those who are negative on the antibody tests, what happens with them? Now, this has been—I’ve had discussions in the last few days with policymakers, a couple of people in Congress, one U.S. Senator, and I think this is not lost on folks. But I think one early topic that’s come up is, could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated? To say you can’t go back to normal life, where certain people get a head start. Is that an inequity we would tolerate? I personally think that it is better than the status quo if we can send 10 or 20 percent of the people back on the basis of having immunity that’s proven on the basis of a lab-based result that’s now available. That’s a good thing, and everyone stands to benefit from it.”
A draft for discussion obtained by Contra shows Ramaswamy pitched this strategy to policymakers.
“After its apex of COVID-19 cases, each state should start to administer universal antibody testing to determine which individuals have immunity to SARS-Cov-2 and which individuals do not,” he wrote. “Individuals with immunity can return to normal life, be released from social distancing practices, and help restart the economy.”
“States should also have a well-designed plan for who should be released from social distancing norms to help revive the economy in advance of the availability of a COVID-19 vaccine,” he added.
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In the discussion draft, he countered concern of societal “backlash against discriminating on the basis of antibody test results” by arguing that the alternative would be to “lift shelter-in-place and social distancing mandates on everyone which would increase the risk of new outbreaks.” ⤵️
He proposed a “public-private partnership” whose stakeholders could be a “division of government, a private company, or a nonprofit organization” that would maintain “the registry of individuals who are immune and individuals who should be prioritized for testing.” ⤵️
As it turns out, Datavant, a healthcare data company launched by Ramaswamy, pushed something like that in 2020.
The Wall Street Journal reported Datavant was “spearheading” an effort “to create a registry of COVID-19 patients by pooling medical records from across the country.” ⤵️
In February 2020, Datavant announced that a George W. Bush-Era FDA commissioner had joined its advisory board.
In April 2020, The WSJ reported Datavant was talking with at least one federal agency about the patient coronavirus database: the FDA.
This only could have been possible because of a proclamation signed in March 2020 that enabled the federal government to “temporarily waive or modify” privacy and reporting rules and regulations concerning patient data
One more thing:
Jared Kushner is close friends with Vivek (they dine together at Trump’s golf clubs) and as senior adviser to Trump, Kushner pushed a national coronavirus surveillance system *around the same time* that Vivek said he was was talking to policymakers about it.
You can read the whole story by clicking the link in my bio and support my work by subscribing here readcontra.com/subscribe
Post Millennial and Human Events and Breitbart don’t want to touch this story because there are real links between Vivek and Trump world
His political director was just hired by Susie Wiles, a top Trump adviser and Mar-a-Lago gatekeeper
I am going to repeat this: Vivek might have changed his views and that is good. But the issue is that he acts like it never happened and his team accuses people who raise issues like this of lying. Read my article and check the links for yourself.
Drunken cheer resounds through the French Quarter on New Year’s Eve. As revelers dance through the streets and prepare to turn the page, a blue 1963 Chevrolet pulls up a block from the headquarters of the New Orleans Police Department.
The engine rumbles off. Mark Essex alights in the night with a green duffel bag along Perdido Street. He is packing a Ruger .44 Magnum carbine, a .38-caliber revolver with the serial number filed off, a gas mask, wire cutters, lighter fluid, matches, and firecrackers. Essex is a young black man with murder on his mind, and tonight, he will fire the first shots in a weeklong spree targeting white people with the aim of starting a revolution.
Essex would go on to kill eight, including three police officers. His rampage only ended with the intervention of a rogue United States Marine Corps pilot named Charles Pitman, who commandeered a helicopter without military authorization to help hunt Essex.
This is the story of the New Orleans Sniper, the seven days of hell he visited upon that city, and the uncommon valor of the man who risked his life and career to save others.
When “Chuck” died of cancer in 2020, he was a retired lieutenant general who had flown 1,200 missions in Vietnam, survived being shot down seven times, took an anti-materiel rifle round to the leg, and played a part in Operation Eagle Claw. But he said the thing he was proudest of in life was having helped take down Essex.
New Orleans showed its enduring gratitude to Pitman by making him an honorary police captain in 1991. The Marines rewarded him with a threatened court-martial for “borrowing” a helicopter. The issue was thankfully resolved when U.S. Rep F. Edward Hébert, a New Orleans-based Democrat and then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, lobbied on Pitman’s behalf.
Harvey Mansfield once defined manliness as “confidence in a situation of risk,” a quality he argued has been in short supply in the West of late. Pitman had that and then some. A harder American you would be hard-pressed to find. Pitman deserves to be honored, and that was a big part of why I wrote this story.
You’d have never guessed Mark James Robert Essex would someday be a crazed Pan-African nationalist shown the door by prominent Black Panthers who dismissed him as “beyond crazy.” There had been little in his upbringing to presage a cold-blooded killer.
He was born on August 12, 1949, in Emporia, Kansas, the second of five children. After graduating from high school, he briefly attended college before giving all that up and doing a short stint at the same plant where his father worked. The Navy offered him a way out of Kansas.
The Romans would, on occasion, engage in the practice of condemning the memory of emperors after their deaths. Monuments would be defaced, names struck from inscriptions, coins bearing their countenance recalled or countermarked.
America has seen its fair share of sanctions against memory in recent years, with schools, streets, and libraries renamed and statues toppled.
The latest batch of victims might be soldiers who were awarded Medal of Honor citations for their actions at the Battle of Wounded Knee.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has ordered a panel to convene and review 20 citations bestowed by the U.S. Army to troops who participated in that engagement. The panel must submit a report that includes a “retain or rescind” recommendation for each recipient by October 15.
Their awards cite actions including rescuing others in the heat of battle.
I wrote about the panel and the buried history of Wounded Knee today:
One Brigadier General E. D. Scott actually published an investigation of the official records of the engagement in The Field Artillery Journal in 1939. He did so because the year before newspapers began referring to Wounded Knee as not the site of a battle but a “massacre.” 2/
Scott pored over official documents and statements, coming away with a very different picture than what is accepted today: the Sioux started the fight and the troopers acted in self-defense. He even found quotes from Indians blaming their comrades for the slaughter. 3/
Jocelyn Nungaray’s murder at the hands of two men from Venezuela has become a national flashpoint in the debate over immigration. It also comes on the heels of a series of rapes and killings by illegal aliens, mainly targeting girls and women. 🧵
The murder of Laken Hope Riley in Georgia was perhaps the most high-profile case before this. She was out on a jog when an illegal alien from Venezuela ambushed her and beat her so badly that he disfigured her skull. 2/
About a week later, a 14-year-old girl was raped by an Ecuadorian man in Louisiana who was arrested after he stabbed and tried to rob another victim. 3/
I have neighbors who owns pit bulls and they open their front door and allow them to run rampant in the neighborhood. They charge people and bark and run from property to property peeing and pooping. I’ve got between them and my kids once before.
We recently called animal control and the police after this happened a few times (they also came into our backyard and barked at my wife as she was about to leave the house) and nobody did anything. Animal control took the dogs for maybe two hours and allowed the owners to claim them. Within an hour of the dogs being home, the owner let them out again, and they immediately began terrorizing my neighbor’s dog while it was on their property. So I picked up a chair and scared them off, called animal control again. The guy who owns them doesn’t give a shit. It seems like he let his dogs out again as a flex. It’s like he knows the system is on his side or something. Very strange behavior. He just leaned on the railing of his porch and watched us chase his dogs around.
But the most bizarre thing is that I have neighbors who are loath to do anything because they seem to think it’s not nice. Not sure if this is an extreme case of “Midwestern nice” or something else.
The owner is a white guy with a man bun who wears neon pink pants btw
Pit bulls are extremely aggressive and require disciplined owners. Not all breeds are the same. But very stupid people seem to like very big and strong dogs they can’t control
Today, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill designed to ban the crime against children called “gender-affirming care.” What DeWine presented as the well-thought-out reasoning behind his decision was a steaming pile of garbage.
DeWine claimed that, were he to support the bill, “Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is best for a child than the two people who know that child the best—the parents.”
“The Ohio way is to approach things in a systematic manner, to follow the evidence, to be careful, and that’s really what we’re doing,” DeWine added.
Where to begin?
Perhaps it's best to start by highlighting that there is little (to be charitable) to no (to be honest) solid evidence behind the long-term effectiveness of “gender-affirming care” for minors.
Two major investigations recently conducted by The New York Times and Reuters came to that conclusion, each in their own wending way. Moreover, the puberty blockers used in this obscene form of “care” are administered off-label—without approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The pharmaceutical companies that profit from this have no desire to even conduct clinical trials to establish their safety in this regard or attempt to understand the permanent consequences of blocking puberty at a critical developmental stage. Why should they bother? They have fools like DeWine who will gladly enable them to pump poison into the veins of your sons and daughters.
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Lupron Depot-Ped is the most commonly prescribed puberty blocker given to “transgender youth.” Here are some adverse events filed in the FDA’s reporting database in connection with the drug:
So when DeWine says he is following the evidence, he betrays his stupidity about the issue or assumes the average American is stupid or both. But they’re certainly smarter than he is on this.⤵️